A couple of months ago, Jane and I finally got round to putting visitors' books in our two holiday cottages, inviting "comments and suggestions". For six years, we had resisted, not least because, on perusing a few visitors' books down the years, we have ourselves recoiled slightly. The most disconcerting comment of all was at Cliveden, the swish country-house hotel, where we stayed in a suitably fancy room for one night about 15 years ago. "Great rumpy-pumpy in the Canadian hot tub" our immediate predecessors had written, which not only put us right off the Canadian hot tub, but also took the edge off climbing into the vast four-poster, knowing that the last people in it were the sort of folk who say "rumpy-pumpy".

The American satirist and comic-book artist Will (at times Bill) Elder was one of the last surviving denizens of the Crypt of Terror – sometimes the Vault of Horror, on occasion the Haunt of Fear – in other words the downtown New York editorial offices of EC Comics, unequivocally the finest and most influential (as well as the most notorious) producer of comic books in the 20th century.

An imposingly tall, blond actor, John Phillip Law made his strongest impression on screen in the outlandish science-fiction fantasy Barbarella (1968), playing the handsome blind angel who travels with the space-age heroine (Jane Fonda) through vast galaxies to find the panacea that will enable him to fly again. Despite notable roles in several other films, he never quite broke through as a major star, and spent many years starring in Italian-made action films and straight-to-video fare.

England's Steve McClaren has already been rejected once by Paul Scholes, who for several weeks now has been conducting a master-class in the art and the vision required to play in midfield as a consistent match-winning presence rather than an occasional virtuoso contributor. McClaren apparently took up a mildly beseeching posture while making his first request. Now he should go all the way. He should get down on his hands and knees.

THE PRODUCER of the screen musical Grease and the Tony Award-winning stage musical La Cage Aux Folles, Allan Carr was a colourful Broadway and Hollywood figure whose flamboyantly gay life style and wild parties were as noteworthy as his many show-business activities.

BUNNY GIRLS at Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion notoriously visited the bathroom in pairs. For me, at school, lavatory cubicles were places to hide out with mates, the fashion being to squeeze in as many as possible, like students in a Mini.

RAY RUSSELL specialised in the mid-century equivalent of the conte cruel, a potent and often grisly mix of grand guignol, sick humour and American gothic (in a line that runs directly from Poe through H.P. Lovecraft and now takes in such chroniclers of the putrefying psyches as Bret Easton Ellis). His chief plot elements - or at any rate the ones he utilised with what seemed the greatest facility and enthusiasm - were torture (chiefly of the medieval variety), perversion, sexual violence, grotesqueries, and irony of the most dreadful kind.

The Last Resort by Alison Lurie, Vintage pounds 6.99. If Alison Lurie's characters fret about the disintegrating ozone layer, perishing rainforests and HIV, they do so in the context of a witty social comedy that undermines their own existence. In her first novel for 10 years, the former Pulitzer prize-winner sharpens her satirical skills on 46-year-old Jenny, a "walking anachronism" who has devoted her life to her naturalist husband, Wilkie Walker. In exchange, this almost stereotypically selfish male exploits her intelligence in his work without crediting her contributions. Lurie sets up a predatory-hetero, caring-homosexual dichotomy with a lesbian cat among the pigeons in the shape of Lee. At their age, they should all know better, but Lurie ensnares them in a folie a trois that subtly pinpoints the desperation underlying social relations. However, Lurie cannot live for too long in the shadows, and the transitory community of Florida's Key West gives "the world's most enjoyable author" plenty of room to manoeuvre in her tragi-comedy of love and mortality. Good- humoured self-awareness triumphs over all, and those characters mired in political correctness and self-importance receive a strong dose of Lurie's spiky irony.

THE Most Noble John George Vanderbilt Henry Spencer- Churchill, Eleventh Duke of Marlborough, has taken legal action against a firm based in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, over the right to register "BLENHEIM-PALACE.CO- .UK" as a domain name on the Internet.